Description

The Late Bronze Age (ca. 1000-250 BC) was a crucial period during which the Chinese Classics came into being and famous thinkers such as Confucius (ca. 551-479 BC) laid the intellectual foundations of traditional Chinese civilisation. Complementing and often challenging the surviving writings, Lothar von Falkenhausen develops a self-consciously archaeological perspective on the social conditions in this time. He analyses clan and lineage organisation, social stratification, gender and ethnic differences, as well as social change over time. Falkenhausen not only presents new data, but also thinks about these data in new ways, emphasisng the nexus between the social order and ritual practices and introducing anthropological approaches as-yet rarely tested in China.show more

Flap copy

Chinese Society in the Age of Confucius is based on the most up-to-date archaeological discoveries. It introduces new data, as well as new ways to think about them - modes of analysis that, while familiar to archaeological practitioners in the West and in Japan, are herein applied to evidence from the Chinese Bronze Age for the first time.show more